[CIG-LONG] tracking sedimentary layers during deformation

[Walter Landry]

Tristan Salles-Taing <sallestaing at gmail.com> wrote:
> For the moment Gale is not able to restart from a considered time step such
> as Underworld so the material characteristics are lost between two starts
> but Guillaume Duclaux (CSIRO such as me)
> said that it will maybe be available in the next release. 

Restarting from a checkpoint will definitely be available in the next release.

> Then I will have
> to see how I can restart a Gale simulation with additional materials
> (consisting of Sedsim stacked sedimentary layers)...anyway
> that's not the purpose of my mail.
> 
> First of all, if you are interested in the modifications I made how can I
> send them to you (I suppose you want to check them so is it ok if I use
> subversion) ?

I am very interested in the modifications to SurfaceAdaptor.  I always
had such a fix in the back of my mind.  As for SurfaceShape, I do not
quite see how it differs from a regular polygon shape.  If you just
send me the files, then I would probably have a better idea.

> Secondly, I still have some issues when I try to export the modified
> sedimentary layers from Gale. I already lost a lot of precision when I
> import the SurfaceShape from Sedsim to Gale due to the fact that
> Gale is distributing the swarm particle randomly inside a cell. So there
> isn't a perfect match between my SurfaceShape coordinates and the swarm
> particles. Then at the end of Gale run, I am computing
> new surfaces which delimitate the different particles layers after
> deformation. These surfaces are used to find the new sedimentary layers
> thicknesses. However the surface tracking is really poor mainly
> because it relies on randomly located particles.
> 
> Is there a way of forcing a particle two be at a specific location (X,Y,Z)
> and can I track this particle during Gale run ?

You can add tracers at particular points that are then advected along
with the other particles.  I am still not 100% confident about how
well they work, so I have not documented them.  There is an example of
how to use them in

  input/examples/tibet.xml

Cheers,
Walter Landry
walter at geodynamics.org